Programming iOS 4

Navigating Your Code

Developing an Xcode project involves editing code in many files at once. Xcode provides numerous ways to navigate your code. Many of these have been mentioned in previous chapters.

The Project navigator

If you know something about the name of a file, you can find it quickly in the Project navigator (Command-1) by typing into the search field in the filter bar at the bottom of the navigator (Edit → Filter → Filter in Navigator, Command-Option-J). For example, type xib to see just your nib files. Moreover, after using the filter bar, you can press Tab and then the Up or Down arrow key to navigate the Project navigator. Thus you can reach the desired nib file with the keyboard alone.

The Symbol navigator

As with the Project navigator, the filter bar can quickly get you where you want to go. For example, to see all dealloc implementations in your code, highlight the first two icons (the first two are light, the third is dark) and type deall in the search field.

The jump bar

Every path component of the jump bar is a menu:

The bottom level

At the bottom level (farthest right) in the jump bar is a list of your file’s method and function declarations and definitions, in the order in which they appear (hold Command while choosing the menu to see them in alphabetical order); choose one to navigate to it.

You can add your own entries to this bottom-level menu using the #pragma mark directive. For example:

#pragma mark Memory Management - (void)dealloc { [window release]; ...